Reading this piece by John Phelan at the Center of the American Experiment about the rise and fall of Hubert Humphrey, it’s a little bit amazing how little, in someways, has changed over the past 60 years:
“We’re not going to let the political philosophy of the DFL be dictated from the Kremlin,” Humphrey said. “You can be a liberal without being a Communist, and you can be a progressive without being a communist sympathizer, and we’re a liberal progressive party out here. We’re not going to let this left-wing communist ideology be the prevailing force because the people of this state won’t accept it, and what’s more, it’s wrong.” His Republican opponent in Minnesota’s 1948 senate race had voted against the Marshall Plan for European aid, and Humphrey charged that “if American policy had been decided by the vote of the senior Senator from Minnesota, we might be negotiating with the Russians now in London instead of Berlin.”
Especially regarding the behavior of the left’s vanguard elite (emphasis added):
Whatever the motivation, Humphrey was now in the front line of an increasingly bitter civil war in the Democratic Party. Many young activists, drawn into politics and the party by the struggle for civil rights, were bitterly opposed to the Vietnam war. Known as the New Left, as distinct from the old left of Rauh’s coalition, their opposition escalated along with the war. Wherever Humphrey went, he was met with abuse from anti-war protestors. At Stanford in March 1967, for example, demonstrators mobbed his car screaming, “War criminal!” “Murderer!” and “Burn, Baby, Burn!” Several tried to break through the police cordon, and a can of urine was thrown over one of Humphrey’s Secret Service men. Humphrey had little affinity for the student radicals. Recalling his time as a student at the University of Minnesota in the 1930s, he said, “I didn’t have much time to join a protest movement, I was concerned about being able to earn enough to eat.” He compared the protestors’ “foul language and physical violence” to “Hitler youth breaking up meetings in Germany.” In 1966, referring to his battle with the DFL Communists, he told reporters “I fought those bastards then and I’m going to fight them now.”
Of course, that was at a time when “the greatest generation“ were still in their prime working years, and the degenerate radical left was a relatively new abscess. Today’s “new, new left“ is the children, grandchildren and indoctrinees of the hippies Humphrey was talking about.
The “New Left” was a plan by CPUSA to disconnect the public’s connection between the Rosenburgs and “progressives”. The plan was to coopt affluent, White kids.
It was crafted and carried out by teams headed by Saul Alinsky, Abby Hoffman, David Horowitz, Jerry Rubin, Steve Weissman, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers,
Bernardine Dohrn and others.
Today, many New Left leaders can be found in positions of power in media, academia and government…they were hugely successful.
Humphrey and the Democrat old guard weren’t bent on the downfall of America, but their work blazed the trail.
They were useful idiots in the truest sense of the phrase.
Almost every Minnesotan of a certain age has a Humphrey anecdote. Here’s mine.
My great uncle got out of the military after WW2 and started a family. Sometime, in the late 40s, he met Humphrey in a handshake line and complained to him about the housing shortage (great uncle & his wife & child were living in a quonset hut at the time).
Skip ahead two decades and uncle is a medium important person at an MN corporation attending a meet and greet with Humphrey. Great uncle introduces himself to Humphrey and Humphrey comments that it looked like he had gotten out of that quonset hut.
Now that is a retail politician.
democrat party constitution preamble:
we the people of the united states, in order to form an absolutely perfect union, must destroy the old one
well on their way to accomplishing the goal of destroying the old one
not so certain the new one will be as perfect as they think it will be